Developing SURI:The Seventh Note

This is the first page of our blog series about developing our first commercial game

What is SURI:The Seventh Note

Suri: The seventh note is a 2D metroidvania set in mythical India with a rhythmic twist. The world of Ragamandala resonates, moves and shifts to the beat of an enigmatic rhythm. This rhythm takes hold of the world and chains it to its whims and thoughts. Step into the shoes of a mysterious traveller who ends up in Ragamandala and gets thrown into the conflict between the sacred six Gandharvas and reigning king and the mysterious mastermind behind this enignmatic, all pervasive cruel rhtyhm. Will you find the prophesised Seventh Note and bring an end to this iron handed rule of the Rhythm?

Explore the world of Ragamandala to find the mystery of the Seventh Note

What kind of a game is SURI: The Seventh Note

SURI: The Seventh Note is a 2D Metroidvania game. Our game is set in mythical India drawn in a bold and colourful pen and ink artstyle. The most unique aspect of the game would be the music sync implementation. The world of the game reacts to the music in the game. The platforms, traps and enemies in the world move in lockstep to the music. This results in a completely new kind of rhythm game.

How to do you mix a 2D metroidvania with rhythm elements? The most common way of doing this is by taking agency away from the player by making the player move in a constant speed (like Bit Trip Runner), or force the player to move at a constant speed in a given direction (like the music levels in Rayman legends).

We wanted to go via a radically different route, where we keep the player agency with respect to movement, which is a one of our favourite aspects of the metroidvania genre, but make the environment move to the beat. This would mean that all the platforms , the traps, lasers, spikes and enemies all react to certain parts of the song and change their state (move, attack, flip etc) on beat.

This was daunting at first and our first approach was to time everything correctly with the BPM of the song (like in the case of 140), but that restricted our capabilities quite a bit. We wanted our songs to flow more naturally and have the world react to them as well. Enter FMOD Markers.

Custom FMOD pipeline

The whole idea started with our Audio engineer identifying that markers exported along with the tracks in FMOD can be used to coreograph our world perfectly. So we did a couple of quick prototypes to test it out and it started working really well and gave us the confidence to get started with this idea.

The other issue was music composition and related level design. How do we create music that works with all levels and how do you create levels that work with all music. This quickly became a chicken and egg problem and instead of wasting more time, we decided that we will have some rules set for making the music and the level design will be based on that. This is a rhythm game too in some sense. Some of the rules were the BPM, the time signature, the chord progressions and how many progressions you could have etc.

Our Audio engineer also found a nifty way to add export all markers into a form that is easily accessible as a Scriptable Object in Unity so that adding a new song becomes seamless as our Music Processing Classes can easily react to a new song that is being added

Level Design Challenges

Given a song, we decided how to make the most out of it by identifying the progressions in the song, breaking them down and assigning them to mechanics/traps in the game. This was daunting at first, but once we got the hang of it, it became a zen like experience to design new traps or mechanics which can put in the level.

Since we decided to break the music down into different progressions, we already had a natural method of setting up progression in the game as well. We kept simpler traps/challenges in the lower end of the progression spectrum and as the level goes on, the music’s further progressions come into picture and more challenging or complicated traps/challenges come into play interspersed with the existing ones.

This helps us really mix and match the various challenges we have in a satisfying way trying to maintain the state of flow that the player would get into.

The world is alive with the sound of music

The final piece of the puzzle was to align the world to the beats and rhythm of the song as well. We decided to have set dressing and background elements in the world react to the song and animate on beat. This is similar to the implementation in Soundfall, but it is not procedural as such. If you look closely in the video present in the homepage, you might see some cacti dancing and smoking to the beat and that is just a sneak peak of the things to come. We aim to get rid of UI marker elements and replace them with backgound elements as such to keep the player in the loop with the beat of the song and not break immersion as well.

Thus SURI:The Seventh Note was born

Blending all these genres and ideas together, we have the game SURI:The Seventh Note. A 2D Metroidvania set in a land cursed to move to the beat in the backdrop of Indian mythos and culture. This is a passion project of several folks who really want to highligh Indian culture and Art through the extremely versatile medium that is Video Games.